It was an unusually quiet election: just a handful of yard signs, only one face-to-face debate, mediocre turnout, no incumbents defeated, few bumper stickers or direct mail pieces. Meanwhile, our flood tide of illegal immigrants is beginning to ebb, while home foreclosures, commercial real estate vacancies, and unemployment are still on the rise.
Perhaps the most significant victory of this borrrr-ing election was won by Mayor Nancy Stevens, as she breezed to her "3-peat" victory for a third term. Stevens easily carried each and every precinct in the city. She demolished her young opponent, political rookie Joe Collins, by a 58-42 margin.
To be sure, Mayor Stevens has not yet reached the electoral heights achieved by Boston mayor Tom Menino, who garnered his fifth consecutive term last week. But Stevens is now poised to achieve that objective, or something quite similar, in the near future. This, of course, is on the assumption that she might choose to do it.
The second most interesting victory of the night was the triumph of what we might call the "Vigeant Team," composed of all four incumbent councilors at-large, as led by the Council's president, Arthur Vigeant, an 8-term veteran of those hallowed chambers at Marlborough's century-old City Hall.
That team, augmented by ward councilors like financial consultant Joe Delano and city Republican chair Paul Ferro, is indeed a powerful bloc of fiscal conservatives. Most of these fiscal conservative councilors are registered Republicans; two of them are not. Councilor at-large Trisha Pope is a registered Democrat, while councilor at-large Mike Ossing is non-enrolled.
Says Vigeant: "We really don't pay a lot of attention at City Hall to party affiliations."
Vigeant notes that he began his political career as a registered Democrat, then switched to non-enrolled (Independent), and finally found his own appropriate home as a registered Republican. Fair enough.
The Vigeant odyssey through these three political iterations is not all that unusual for Marlborough leaders. Remember that former Mayor Michael Hogan washed over to Republican ranks in the 1990s in order to support GOP governors Weld, Cellucci and Swift. And note further that Hogan in the closing days of this 2009 election season purchased a paid political advertisement in the weekly Main Street Journal, for his strong letter of endorsement backing the victorious Vigeant team of four councilors at-large.
But the municipal election earlier this month was by no means the only political event of note. On this past Saturday morning, longtime Republican maverick Christy Mihos charged into Marlborough for a Chamber of Commerce breakfast audience at the Best Western Hotel on Rte 20 west.
As he had noted just days before at a Republican candidates forum in Sudbury, Mihos once again positioned himself as a militant outsider. "If you're looking for an insider, I'm not your candidate," was the way he put it at the Marlborough Chamber's breakfast event.
In the previous election, Mihos ran as a Republican reformer, eager to clean up the various financial fiascos connected with the multi-billion-dollar Big Dig. Mihos had served as an angry watchdog on the Turnpike Board, until finally fired by Republican governor Jane Swift.
But this time around, the feisty convenience store entrepreneur is running in behalf of the Republican Party's libertarian wing. He acknowledged to his Marlborough audience at the Best Western that he is currently working with libertarian leaders Carla Howell and Michael Cloud to achieve dramatic cuts in the Bay State's sales tax, just recently boosted to 6.25 percent. Mihos also offered the crowd a veritable menu of significant budget cuts, including elimination of the estate tax and tolls on the Pike, along with rate reductions on the state's capital gains and income taxes.
Come to think of it, the vote around here last week may not have been that "quiet" after all. Any election that tilts Marlborough once again in the direction of Republican governance and, at the same time, lifts Christy Mihos back into the spotlight, well, that's not exactly "quiet."
Let's just say there are a lot of worried, angry people in this country right now.
Peter B. Young lives in Marlborough.
